Machrone's Law: We're Back, Baby!

Get used to the idea of a terabyte-plus server in your home. It's closer than you think.

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Sometime around the debut of computers sporting the Intel 486 chip, machines were being introduced at about $5,000, which I realized was about the same as the preceding 386-based machines. Which was the same as the PC AT, a fully configured PC-XT, or the original IBM PC. That's also what I paid for my first computer: a Z-80based system that I had to solder together myself.

Thus was born Machrone's Law: The machine you want will always cost $5,000. Note the third and fourth words: the machine you want. Not the cheapest machine, not the one that makes the most sense. The one that makes you drool.

Machrone's Law held true from the birth of personal computers through several generations of Pentiums. But then operating systems and applications stopped evolving as quickly, and their otherwise- insatiable appetite for CPU cycles and memory plateaued. Economies of scale kicked in, and competition got fierce. Prices plummeted. Soon it was hard to spend $3,000 on a computer, then $2,000. In a recent article in the electrical engineering journal IEEE Spectrum, a writer revisited the laws that have governed the past two decades of computing, including Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law, and Machrone's Law. I told the writer that apart from a few esoteric, high-end systems, Machrone's Law had outlived its usefulness.

Suddenly I was inundated by calls and e-mails from people begging to differ. No, they didn't beg; they said I was flat-out wrong. Systems, they said, are as expensive as ever, and the power you can get for 5 grand is what every red-blooded PC user really wants.

I had clearly been blinded by Dell, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard, which have been beating each other silly over gutless $500 machines, while companies such as Velocity Micro and VoodooPC have been selling all the $5,000 machines they can make. Who are the customers? People who don't want to wait 2 hours to convert a DVD format. People who want to see their video edits in real time. People who don't want to lose a game because their machines don't pan around the battlefield as quickly as their competitors'. People who want to store every photo, every CD, and even every DVD locally. Visual-content creators have always lived at the bleeding edge; the more power they have, the more magic they can work.

If you visit one of these high-end vendors' sites, run through the online configurator, and find yourself peaking out at $4,000 or $4,500, don't despair. You're just not thinking about all the things you could or should be doing with your PC. And be smart about your purchase: High-performance processors, video cards, and hard drives run hot. Randy Copeland, president of Velocity Micro, observed, "You could roast a chicken in there." So any time you see an option for more fans or better cooling, take it.

More cooling doesn't necessarily mean more noise. But quiet comes at a cost, too. Oversize heat sinks, heat pipes, and aluminum cases all help to get the heat out without making too much of a racket.

The machine you want may really be two machines, and that $5,000 may be distributed over two boxes. No one will deny that 7,200-rpm and 10,000-rpm high-performance hard drives are noisy. As my friend Will Fastie points out, you can build a box that holds a terabyte of RAID 0 hard drives rather inexpensively and put it someplace where it won't disturb you. The SyncRAID controller is a powerful, inexpensive solution, and ABIT has recently introduced a motherboard with four SATA ports and native RAID support. Get used to the idea of a terabyte-plus server in your home. It's the future, and it's closer than you think. On the other hand, you want a box that goes in your den or living room to be silent and stylish. There's no point in bulking it up with multiple hard drives if you can put them somewhere else.

Regarding home networking, I'll bet you never thought you'd have to ask yourself, "Is 100 megabits enough?" But wired Gigabit Ethernet and ultra- wideband wireless networks are probably going to be more important to converged computer and consumer electronics applications than they are to the vast majority of businesses.

Bill Machrone is vice president of technology at Ziff Davis Publishing and editorial director of the Interactive Media and Development Group. He joined Ziff Davis in May 1983 as technical editor of PC Magazine, became editor-in-chief in September of that year, and held that position for the next eight years, while adding the titles of publisher and publishing director. During his tenure, Machrone created the tough, labs-based comparison reviews that propelled PC Magazine to the forefront of the industry and made it the seventh-largest magazine...
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